LCI Blog: Analytics – Find Out What’s Working for Your Business

By The SSC Team, from our Public Relations Global Network affiliate Stevens Strategic Communications in Westlake, Ohio
Having an accessible and well-designed website, several social media accounts and a subscription to a good news release distribution service are great ways to ensure maximum exposure for your business. After all, if people don’t know who you are, at least they can see that you are offering several easy ways for them to find information about your business.
Though these features are great, you still need other tools to make sure you know they are working and are truly being a help for your business. Being able to gather analytics for your website, social media platforms and news releases is important if you want to be able to show growth and success to your business colleagues.
You can go to Google and type in “website analytics” or “social media analytics” to find a number of tools your business can use to create reports on how many people have visited your site, how many retweets your business’ Twitter account received last month, how many shares you received for posting that video to your Facebook, and much more. So you don’t have to search through the millions of results that Google will produce when you type in “website analytics” or “social media analytics,” here are some of the tools we know work well for businesses.
Google Analytics: This tool is a service that generates detailed statistics about visits to your company’s website. It can help you track visitors to your site, page views, average visit duration, bounce rate, percentage of new visits to your site and even page value. Google Analytics can give you details regarding demographics, behavior, browser and network choices when viewing your site, mobile device views and more. The best part is that this tool comes with a lot of these features for free.
HootSuite: Your business may use HootSuite just so you can schedule your Facebook and Twitter posts for after business hours. But, there is more to this tool than you may think. For a small monthly fee, HootSuite can help you generate reports about your social media data and web traffic. It can help you measure results with your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as your company’s return on investment with these social platforms.
CisionPoint/Business Wire: Cision and Business Wire are both news release distribution services. Those who use these tools can distribute news releases to a large audience across the nation and even across the world. Cision offers analytics for news releases and allows its users to create reports on their own in regards to media mix, reach, social media influence, number of hits and more. After sending a release through Business Wire, a report is generated within an hour and emailed to the user. Business Wire reports are updated continuously throughout the year, so you can offer up weekly, monthly or even quarterly reports to your colleagues without much effort at all. Both of these services are costly, but can be worth it if PR is a main focus for your business.
These are just a few tools you can use to generate analytics, but there are a plethora of them out there. And don’t forget, some social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube have analytics programs of their own. Do some research and find out what tools can work the best for your business.
Questions or comments? Please send them to [email protected] or [email protected].